What Happened: July 15, 2021

The Big Story

Previously debunked accounts of Russia colluding with former President Donald Trump are revived in a new story that has been hyped as a “bombshell” but provides little evidence to support its explosive claims. On Thursday morning, The Guardian published an article containing what its authors claim is a leaked 2016 internal Kremlin document showing Russian President Vladimir Putin personally authorizing a secret operation to support Donald Trump’s campaign for the presidency. Notes from a Russian national security council meeting allegedly show Putin asserting that a Trump presidency “would help secure Moscow’s strategic objectives, among them ‘social turmoil’ in the U.S.” Additionally, the documents refer to the Kremlin possessing kompromat, an espionage term, popularized by the Steele dossier, that refers to compromising material used for influence and extortion. Despite the echoes of the discredited dossier, major news outlets are amplifying the most explosive claims from The Guardian report. “BREAKING: Bombshell Kremlin leak appears to confirm Putin has Trump ‘kompromat,’” tweeted The Daily Beast to its 1.3 million followers. Raw Story tweeted to its nearly quarter of a million followers, “‘The pee tape is real’: Critics claim Kremlin leak confirms ‘every awful thing said about Trump ends up being absolutely true.’” Notably, The Guardian authors refer to “what are assessed to be leaked Kremlin documents” in the article’s first paragraph—acknowledging that they cannot confirm the authenticity of the documents on which the article is based. Former U.S. cybersecurity chief and staunch Trump critic Chris Krebs tweeted Thursday, “This is far too convenient & reeks of #disinfo operation.” There is also the spotty record of The Guardian story’s lead author, Luke Harding, to consider. In late 2018 Harding published an article in The Guardian alleging a secret meeting between Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort and WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange inside the Ecuadorian embassy in London. The lack of evidence for these claims, which were never proved and widely deemed implausible, tarnished Harding’s reputation. Coincidentally, New York magazine published an interview yesterday titled “‘The Steele Dossier Was a Case Study in How Reporters Get Manipulated’” that mentions how “people like Rachel Maddow and the Guardian’s Luke Harding seem to have paid no price for their failings.” 

Here’s The Guardian’s article: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jul/15/kremlin-papers-appear-to-show-putins-plot-to-put-trump-in-white-house

The New York Magazine interview that mentions Harding: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/07/steele-dossier-was-case-study-in-journalistic-manipulation.html


Today’s Back Pages: Arts and Rants

The Rest

• Fewer than half of Americans trust the media, according to the communication firm Edelman’s 2021 trust barometer. The company surveyed more than 33,000 people in 28 countries and found that declining trust in the press is a global phenomenon—with the level of trust in the United States dipping below 50% for the first time. Asked whether journalists were “purposely trying to mislead people by saying things they know are false or gross exaggerations,” 56% of respondents agreed, while 58% felt that “most news organizations are more concerned with supporting an ideology or political position than with informing the public.”

• Johnson & Johnson has recalled five Neutrogena and Aveeno spray sunscreens due to finding cancer-causing chemical benzenes in some samples of the products. The company said the amounts detected were low and not expected to cause health problems in people who have used the product.

• Since introducing new COVID-19 guidance last year that censored information about the anti-malaria drug hydroxychloroquine, for example, Twitter reports that it has challenged 11.7 million accounts, suspended 1,496, and removed over 43,010 pieces of content globally. In other news from the company’s latest transparency report, the number of demands from governments across the world for Twitter to take down tweets from verified journalists and news publications increased by 26% in the second half of 2020 compared to the first half of the year, with India making the most demands.

• Inflation will continue into the near future, Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell said in an appearance on Capitol Hill Wednesday. While Powell acknowledged the reality of a phenomenon that the White House has been emphatically trying to downplay, he said that the rise in prices would be temporary, though he did not provide an exact time frame. That assessment is widely disputed in the business world and by economists such as Former U.S. Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers, who worked for both the Clinton and Obama administrations and has criticized the Biden White House for stoking inflation.

• The Senate passed a bill to presumptively ban goods from China’s Xinjiang province unless importers can proactively prove that they were not produced with forced labor. Xinjiang is home to some 12 million ethnic Uyghurs, mostly Muslim, who have been collectively forced into “reeducation camps” by the Chinese government. The bill still needs to get passed in the House before going to the White House to be signed into law.

• A planned meeting today at the White House between German Chancellor Angela Merkel and President Biden will address disagreements over the $12 billion Nord Stream 2 pipeline that would deliver natural gas from Russia to Germany. Officially the White House opposes the deal for giving too much power and leverage to Russia, but in May the Biden administration lifted sanctions on the company building the pipeline. This is expected to be the last White House visit for Merkel, who is scheduled to leave office soon after more than 15 years in power.
Read it here: https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20210715-merkel-visits-white-house-in-swan-song

• The Pentagon has pledged $1.5 billion over the next five years to developing its artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities. The money is expected to go into the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center. Ultimately, Congress will have to provide the funding before the military can spend it, but in remarks Tuesday, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin said that the Pentagon has more than 600 AI projects currently in the works. Last March the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence released a report concluding that the United States is falling behind in AI competition with China. 

• A bipartisan group of congresspeople raised concerns this week over government agencies’ use of facial-recognition technology. Last month a government report found that 20 federal agencies out of the 42 contacted were using or owned facial-recognition technology. One of the witnesses called before the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism, and Homeland Security was a Detroit man who was arrested by police after facial-recognition software incorrectly identified him as a suspect.
Read it here: https://www.nextgov.com/cio-briefing/2021/07/bipartisan-calls-regulate-facial-recognition-tech-grow-louder/183761/

• Do police officers who already enjoy multiple legal protections not afforded to ordinary citizens also deserve to be recognized as an identity group for the purposes of hate crimes laws? Utah thinks they do. A 19-year-old woman was charged with a hate crime in the state last week after she allegedly destroyed a pro-police sign. It’s enough to make you think that maybe hate crime laws are ineffective, misguided, and prone to abuse.

The Back Pages

Arts and Rants: Cultural odds and ends dug up from the digital database

A rant to begin. In a 2015 interview with Mark E. Smith, the now-departed founder and maestro of the band The Fall, he was asked the question “Internet: good or bad.” Many experts have claimed that his assessment of the internet, printed here, contains a cryptic reference to members of the Tablet staff:

The group read it, you know? All the groups I’ve ever had read it. But I think it’s bad for your eyesight. I’ve got friends, not in the group, but serious Jewish guys who do it for a living, and they’re “Look at this, look at that,” and it’s all very interesting, but I think it’s like a foreign language, if you’ve not been brought up with it. But even those techno buffs, they believe everything they read on it. I get people on the street, and they say, “I thought you were in Newcastle today.” And I’m like, “I turned down the show six weeks ago.” You understand me? It’s Chinese whispers.

The full interview: https://www.uncut.co.uk/features/mark-e-smith-im-not-going-to-give-all-my-secrets-away-66934/4/

The digital video “American Reflexxx,” by Alli Coates and Signe Pierce, is an exhilarating, suspenseful 14-minute trip through violence, sexual panic, and drunken Virginia Beach boardwalk culture shot like a first-person video game. The star of this piece is an otherworldly figure whom I have named “Big Sex Object Mirrorface” for reaons that will be clear.

See it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bXn1xavynj8

Mal Waldron Plays Erik Satie. Waldron, the brilliant and tragic American Jazz pianist, plays his arrangement of “Three Gymnopedies,” composed by the French avant-garde minimalist Satie. I think this is the music playing in the film as the fugitive character drives all night down the Pacific Palisades through the ancient mists. I’m not sure what film he’s in.

Listen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ppguMAJiqK8


(Got a piece of art or a rant that you’d like to share? Send it to [email protected] for possible inclusion in a future issue of The Scroll, along with your questions and comments.)